Page 47 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

The raven led her back to the clearing with the stain, its pace more sedate now that it knew she was cooperating, or perhaps it too was tired. The path it took out of the labyrinth was the one that Livira had plotted out and she took some satisfaction in the fact.

Once they reached new territory, she resumed her placing of books to mark the way. The raven watched her with evident disapproval but didn’t choose to make a fight of it. It seemed prepared to tolerate disruption but not damage.

A few dozen more twists and turns brought them back to the straight lines and right-angled corners that dominated the library. Livira found herself relieved, even though she was really just exchanging one kind of lost for another.

The raven led with a sense of purpose, taking her across the chamber towards the door opposite the one she entered by. After a near infinity of narrow aisles they broke into a clearing before the corridor.

Momentarily filled with the energy that change can infuse, Livira overtook the bird’s hopping and raced ahead to the door, arriving breathless. She slapped both hands to the white surface, pulled them back and slapped them down again. The door, which was supposed to melt into mist, didn’t register the impact of Livira’s hands in any way.

“It’s not working!” Livira spun around to fix the raven with an accusing stare. A sudden fear seized her. What if the door she’d come in by no longer melted away at her touch? What if she were trapped in this second chamber, locked away from her classmates through simple ignorance of some small trick required for returning?

The raven continued its jerky advance, paying her no attention.

“It’s locked,” Livira repeated. But as the bird tapped the blackness of its beak to the pristine white of the door the whole thing melted away like well-mist before the sun’s glare. Livira frowned critically at her hand and cast a side-eyed glance at the raven’s beak. “It was locked...”

The raven carried on, paying Livira no heed, and after a pause, she followed it. A hundred yards of corridor led to a third chamber, seeming just as huge as the previous two. The clearing before the door was rectangular. The shelves were taller, fashioned from what looked like black wood, the gaps between them wider. It was still the library but somehow, although so much was exactly the same, it managed at the same time to seem utterly alien.

Livira took a deep breath. The place even smelled different. The smell of books was something she had come to appreciate over her weeks in the outer library. The scent of old glue, of polished leather, dry parchment, the mustiness in the air as the spores of a thousand moulds and fungi sought purchase: it was the aroma of time itself, the scent of passing years. And when you opened a book, especially one that had waited lifetimes for someone to turn its cover, that first breath was of something new, almost individual.

The foxing that marked almost every page had a sourness to it. Sometimes Livira would stare at the brownish patination instead of the text, wondering what alternate story might be read there if she only knew the language. She thought of it as time’s fingerprints left on the whiteness of the page, or the marks of water that never was, tears that never fell.

The Dust had been haunted by the ghost of the water which once filled the vanished lake. The phantoms of long-departed waves still rippled the light, and their whispering mocked the last of the dying trees. That same invisible ocean seemed to have flooded the library and left its touch on every page.

“Something’s different here.” Livira followed the raven, whose progress hadn’t slowed one iota. It chose an aisle and wove its erratic path between the opposing shelves. Livira paused to check the spines of the first books. She was used to not understanding the language, and often not recognising it. Most of the alphabets in the first chamber had been ones she was now acquainted with, thanks to what Meelan had called the steel trap of her memory. Less so in the second chamber. But here, in the third of the chambers she’d entered, the writing on the spines seemed like something different entirely, scattered dots and ridges, some raised, some indented. The bird squawked at her, and she hurried after it.

—

Differences aside, the chamber, like the others, demonstrated a patchwork of approaches. As if the shelf-builders started by one door and built outwards over many generations, using different materials, different designs, stamping the spirit of their age onto the effort, eschewing tradition. Did the first to come here simply find vast empty rooms? And if so... who decreed that books be stored here?

Exhaustion began to sink its teeth again and Livira longed for sleep—but what she saw around the next corner woke her up. Something she hadn’t seen for over a month and had never expected to find in this place.

“It’s dark...”

It was either darkness she saw before her, or a black mist filling the space between the two walls of the aisle and reaching a good two yards up them. A black mist would make more sense, for surely darkness didn’t behave like this, standing shoulder to shoulder with the light and separated by a sharp divisor. But it looked like darkness as the raven hopped into it without pause.

Meelan had said something ominous when she’d asked if it ever got dark in the library. She remembered his unsettling growl as he’d said, “In places.” Livira gathered her scattered courage. She tightened her jaw. Had Meelan ever really seen it himself? Had he been this far out before? She stepped closer to the black wall barring her way. It didn’t look like mist. It seemed like darkness as she reached in tentatively, pulling her fingers swiftly back for examination. If it were a black mist then it was one that couldn’t be felt or disturbed. The bird had been worryingly silent since it went in... “Dung on it!” Livira plunged forward and immediately found herself in darkest night. She pulled back and blinked in the light.

“SQUAWK!”

The bird’s cry, like nails scraped down Master Logaris’s chalkboard, summoned her on, and thus commanded she followed, arms questing before her.

Livira inched forward, listening hard for the scrapes and stutters of the raven ahead of her. The library had still to show her any horrors, and yet all it took to summon monsters from her imagination was to veil her sight. She pictured huge and silent spiders clinging to the shelves above her, watching with too many eyes as she walked blindly towards their webs. She imagined her double, walking noiselessly behind her, identical in every detail save for the void of its eyes and the murder twitching in its fingertips. She imagined—

“Oh.” The darkness vanished as suddenly as if she had just opened her eyes.

The raven raised its head from pecking at the cover of a small black book that lay on the floor a yard ahead of Livira. It eyed the misplaced tome with that same air of agitation it had when seeing Livira set the marker books she hoped would lead her home. Livira scooped the book up, planning to replace it and thereby win some measure of approval from her guide. She looked around for the slot that would reveal where it had come from. There wasn’t one.

She turned the book over in her hands. The edges of the pages were also black, and the title proved impossible to see, only revealing itself under her fingers as an unintelligible series of bumps and dents in whatever hide had been used to bind the covers. Wondering if the pages were similarly indented Livira opened the book. A shriek escaped her, and she nearly dropped it. She’d gone blind! She’d gone blind! Panic subsided as she realised that it must just be that the darkness had returned after a brief respite.

“Bird?”

Silence.

“Bird!” Livira called more loudly. Silence answered. She drew a breath and shouted. “Hey! You! Get me out of here.” She was about to add something about the noisiest thing in the whole library picking a fine time to go quiet when it squawked again. With a sigh she advanced towards it, arms out once more, one hand clutching the open book.

At a snail’s pace she followed the raven for several hundred yards before another squawk indicated that it had changed direction. She made the turn, brushing rows of spines with an outstretched hand. “How far does this dark go?”

“SQUAWK!” This call somehow managed to sound both disdainful and slightly mocking despite the raucous volume.

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